Anthologizing the Atlantic Slave Trade Literature

Abstract

The ever-prolific Jeremy Black has assembled these four volumes of eighty five photo-reproduced articles in English. Ashgate, of course, specializes in this style of print reader and has produced a vast array of topically orga nized collections, supplementing growing availability of at least some of same materials in digital formats. (Readers of this journal will recall that more than ten years ago Patrick Manning published a similarly formatted collection centered on Africa, also through Ashgate/Variorum.)1 I have not confirmed Internet access to entire collection, but scanning sites from which contents of these volumes were taken suggests that nearly all may also be downloaded. The essays included date from 1940 (John Blake on English trade to Portuguese empire in West Africa) through 2004 (Guillaume Daudin on profitability in eighteenth-cen tury French trade). Three were published before 1960, seven in 1960s, twenty in 1970s, twenty-four in 1980s, twenty-two in 1990s, and eight after 2000. This is not place to speculate on various publishers' marketing strategies aimed at instructors seeking print collections for col lege and university classes, but presumably commercial as well as academic considerations led to exclusion of considerable scholarship in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Danish. Black opens each of century-defined volumes with a short intro ductory essay placing articles in their historical contexts. In edi tor's vision, articles fit into a general conceptual framework focusing on challenges that Europeans eventually addressed by sailing captives across Atlantic from Africa to Americas. Examples include role of disease in demographic collapse of Native American populations and contemporaneous expansion of commercialized serfdom in eastern Europe. Black's thoughtful quest for context thus occasionally reaches well beyond a geographical definition of the Atlantic; Araucanian responses in southern Chile, for example, are included as an example of resis tance Europeans encountered as they sought to seize labor from local pop ulations in Americas. Volume 1, on early phases of trade, thus includes two theoretical essays (Domar and Engerman), classic writings on Africa (Wilks and Fage?but not Meillassoux), half a dozen essays on Americas, two minor pieces on English involvement (Blake and Hair), and framing pieces on historiography (Ewald), volume (Lovejoy from